’30 Minutes or Less’ Aims for Double the Bromance

Though it sounds like a promotional catch phrase, director Ruben Fleischer isn’t far off when he calls his new film “30 Minutes or Less” a “double-buddy comedy.”

The raunchy summer movie, which opens this Friday, treads into bromantic territory with its parallel story lines of guys working through prickly aspects of their close friendships.

At a press conference in New York City after a screening of the film in early July, Fleischer and his cast seemed to be playfully at ease with each other, riffing off each other and joking about the film’s close examination of male friendship.

“I think these are realistic relationships between guys,” actor Nick Swardson said at the press conference. “Guys are close. It’s like ‘Bromancing the Stone.’”

During the film, the two sets of male friends are forced to become closer as a series of bizarre circumstances throw them all together in a twisted plot arc. Jesse Eisenberg stars as pizza delivery boy Nick, who turns to his best friend Chet for help when a pair of enterprising deadbeats strap a bomb to his chest and order him to rob a bank. Aziz Ansari plays Chet, and Swardson and Danny McBride play the rival buddy duo with explosive tendencies.

Much of the movie’s quirky dialogue was improvised, the actors said, including some of the film’s funniest bits.

“We tried to make the dialogue feel real,” Swardson said in an interview. “We wanted to bring our natural talking style to the parts.”

At times, the four main characters almost seem like caricatures of the types of roles the four lead actors typically play. Swardson, of “Reno 911!” fame, plays a gentle, well-meaning simpleton, decked out in an impressive mustache. McBride, from “Tropic Thunder” and “Pineapple Express,” is a boisterous blowhard. Eisenberg is a cerebral everyman, and Ansari is his fast-talking, wisecracking sidekick.

“The basic idea of the movie that I pictured was Aziz and Jesse stealing a car and robbing a bank,” Fleischer said in an interview. “And they have no business doing either of those things.”

Fleischer had classic bank heist and car chase movies on set to help inform some of the movie’s more action-packed scenes. The “Zombieland” director and his cast cited films like “Bullit,” “Fargo” and “The Untouchables” as inspiration for their efforts at bank robbing and car jacking. It’s not clear how seriously Fleischer and company took these inspirations.

The film is violent, and veers into some potty-mouthed territory as its main characters tweak each other and exchange improvised insults. Though Swardson said that he hopes the film will build audiences through positive word of mouth, Fleischer was realistic about the movie’s expected audience.

“My mom is not the biggest fan of the movie,” he said, laughing. “We’re aiming for the classic 18-25 demographic. I’ve told my friends this is not for their kids.”

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